They’ve spent the last three days insisting that the explosives were taken from al Qaqaa before troops arrived. Well, guess what? Wrong. (via Political Wire)

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled “explosives.” Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

“We can stick it in those and make some good bombs.” a soldier told our crew.
. . .
In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name “Al Qaqaa”, the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren’t secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

“We weren’t quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn’t appear that this was being secured in any way,” said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. “It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents”.

Here’s some stills from the video in question :

So, faced with the growing evidence that tons of explosives slipped into enemy hands under our noses, the Bush campaign sent Rudy Giuliani out to deliver the new talking points :

“The president was cautious the president was prudent the president did what a commander in chief should do. No matter how you try to blame it on the president the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?”

He’s the same scumbag he was on September 10th.

I hope the troops (and their families) are picking up on this. Apparently the Bush administration’s failures to use enough troops and make a high priority of securing high-power explosives, radioactive material, and dual-use technologies is your fault.